Vince Casarez gives a great overview of the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 technology. This video is part of the extensive group of “At The Whiteboard” videos over on ZDNet.

There are a number of conferences scheduled in the remaining months of 2009 with a Enterprise 2.0 focus.

Some of the more notable ones are:

• Enterprise 2.0 sessions at cEBIT 2009
  Although the Enterprise 2.0 summit is not being held in conjunction with CeBIT in 2009, there are a number of Enterprise 2.0 related sessions taking place during CeBIT 2009. In addition Martin Koser will host a Enterprise 2.0 meetup on Friday 6 March 2009. 
• Enterprise 2.0 Conference
  The largest of all the Enterprise 2.0 conferences is Tech Webs annual Enterprise 2.0 conference. The 2009 conference will take place from 22 – 25 June 2009 at last years venue at the Westin Waterfront. One of the highlights of the Enterprise 2.0 conference is the Launchpad where start ups get to demo their products/solutions in front of the E20 community.
• Office 2.0
  Although the Office 2.0 conference focuses on both consumer and enterprise users, its 2009 theme of “The Global Office” should have a number of Enterprise 2.0 sessions.
• Enterprise 2.0 Summit
  The Enterprise 2.0 Summit will be held from 6 – 8 October 2009 in Frankfurt Deutschland. The 2009 Summit will focus on how to improve business results with Enterprise 2.0.

Oracle Europe has scheduled what is being billed as the first Virtual Enterprise 2.0 Conference focused on Europe on 19 February 2009.

Although I am sure most of the content will focus on Oracle’s Enterprise 2.0 technology solutions, the conference should be interesting in that the keynote by Dennis Krueger will focus on Enterprise 2.0 trends in Europe for 2009. Dennis is the publisher of JDK DE, the largest ECM information portal in Deutschland.

The conference is scheduled to have 5 concurrent tracks available in English, German, French, Spanish and Italian.

Expect to see quite a few more conferences go the virtual route over the next 2 or 3 years as the hard realities of the recession sink into most companies travel budget.

IBM this week held its 5 day Innovation Jam. Innovation Jam is IBM’s online exchange of ideas designed to help solve organizational and global challenges with a crowd-sourcing methodology.

Originally kicked off internally with its first World Jam, IBM has been using  Jam’s to solve business issues since 2001. These Jams have also been utilized by IBM for the dual purpose of demonstrating its various Enterprise 2.0 and WEB 2.0 technologies within the WebSphere and Lotus product Lines.

Based on feedback from an earlier IBM Global CEO Study the areas of focus of the 2008 Innovation Jam were to find ways that global organizations can increase collaboration, innovation, social engagement and responsiveness to change. IBM invited thousands of thought leaders, executives and influencers to participate in the 2008 Jam.

Participants contributed to the 4 theme areas utilizing a standard suite of Enterprise and Web 2.0 tools including wiki, chat, live conferences and other collaboration tools. Some of the themes of interest that emerged from the participants during the Jam were social networking, virtual communities and global supply chain.

Most of the live Jam activity; such as web conferences and group chats, took place during business hours in North America but as the activity map below indicates there was quite a bit of activity in Asia and Western Europe as well.

IBM has made the results of the Jam available to participants and it will be interesting to see if the Innovation Jam concept evolves a bit more in the future to include a larger number of thought leaders to add additional insight.

These videos are useful in comparing the overall look and feel of IBM MashUp Center with solutions from some of IBM’s more established mashup competitors like JackBe and Serena and IBM partners like Kapow Technologies.

The video below is a detailed overview of the environment of Mashup Center.

Mindtouch announced today a new version of its Opensource collaboration and collective intelligence platform. The new version of Mindtouch Deki, “Kilen Woods” introduces new data connection and enterprise integration tools to what is already a very robust Wiki platform.

Aaron Fulkerson, co-founder and CEO, said that:

“MindTouch Deki has evolved into a powerful platform that is the connective tissue for integrating disparate enterprise systems, web services, and Web 2.0 applications, and enables real-time collaboration and collective intelligence – dynamic data collection and application integration.”

New Enterprise Adapters introduced in MindTouch Deki include adapters for:

• SugarCRM
• Salesforce
• LinkedIn
• MySQL
• Microsoft SQL Server, Access and Microsoft ADO.NET
• VisiFire
• PrinceXML
• ThinkFree Office
• WordPress

This new functionality helps MindTouch Deki jump to the front in terms of competing Wiki Platforms as now within a single platform users can create mashups, dashboards, reports etc from within the Wiki interface. This type of enterprise integration will make Wiki’s (if more Wiki platforms are able to catch up with MindTouch and add this type of integration in the future) an easier sell for companies as integration with existing applications is always at the top of the list of wanted features.

MindTouch Deki also differentiates itself from other Wiki platforms in that its existing feature set allows drag and drop in a GUI interface for most of its functionality. This makes adoption within a company a lot easier than other wiki tools in that users do not have to learn html markup etc to create content.

Will be interesting to see if MindTouch can build upon the list of current adapters with integration for high end ERP (SAP, Oracle etc) and CRM (Seible) applications.  MindTouch Deki “Kilen Woods” should be available for download by the end of July

Om Malik’s Structure08 conference is being held on June 25th at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Structure08 was created to inform businesses so they can plan their future computing infrastructure needs. Attendees will have opportunities to review new technologies and determine the right choices based on industry best practices, case studies, ideas and startups.

In addition, the conference organizers just announced this past week that Google will hold the first public workshop on Google AppEngine at the Structure08 conference.

Om has great pull in the tech industry and he has gathered one of the deepest speaker lists I have seen for a conference in quite a while. As a matter of fact I am curious as to how the packed agenda will be squeezed into a one day conference.

The OnDemand Beat Blog has a special discount code for Structure08 for its readers. OnDemand Beat readers can sign up for Structure08 and receive a 10% discount on registration at http://structure08.eventbrite.com/?discount=ONDEMAND

If signing up via the Structure08 registration page use Discount Code ONDEMAND.

Finally don’t forget that CloudCamp will be held the evening prior to Structure08 at Microsoft’s San Francisco Office.

Heading back to Arizona today after a very interesting and informative Enterprise 2.0 2008 conference.

Had a chance to meet with the founders and CEO’s of a number of Enterprise 2.0 firms and have come away very impressed with the software solutions, business models, channel partner plans and ROI of most of the firms products.

There has been much speculation in the consumer Web 2.0 space as to when the bubble will burst on both the irrational valuations and fantastical (made up word:) revenue models based on advertising that consumer Web 2.0 has been built upon.

It not only is clear that Enterprise 2.0 firms are a different breed from their Web 2.0 brethren , it is also clear that many of these firms will not only survive the current economic slowdown but are thriving now that companies are looking for ways to contain cost. On Demand hosted solutions for the Enterprise are really gaining steam at the moment and look likely to increase in market and mind share based on the enthusiasm I have seen from attendees at the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

A few of the Enterprise 2.0 firms (and Enterprise firms like Sun and IBM) I had a chance to meet with whom I will post follow-up articles and reviews about over the next few weeks include:

• Liquid Planner
• Serena Software
• Atlassian
• GroupSwim
• Small World Labs
• Sun for Project SocialSite
• IBM for Lotus Connections and Mashup Center
• Oracle for Sales Prospector
• Aegeon for Spaceo.us
• Veodia
• Igloo
• WorkLight
• Bungee

Stay tuned….